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Comment by kylehotchkiss | Hacker News Reader

India really needs its own Google Maps alternative. I spent a while living there and found the near universal dependence on Google Maps to get anywhere a scary amount of reliance on a foreign service. I worry a Google Maps outage, accidental or intensional, could have big consequences on many people's ability to navigate around. (Eventually people will get directions by just asking on the street, but that's gonna be really tough for drivers) Developers in India could make some really cool solutions to the different address system, provide more interesting sources of realtime data, and better support for local languages.

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What you're saying feels true for any place though. There's a huge reliance on their maps for getting around anywhere and similarly affected by availability.

Open Street map exists as a dataset to build alternatives on, and I've seen a few like Maps.me which are pretty decent. But it does require crowd sourcing.

Large parts of the former USSR are covered by 2gis.com, which has full offline capability. I think the last time I updated maps on my phone was a couple of years ago (although they publish monthly updates), and it still works fine.

China, Russia and South Korea have competing maps services for their countries. I wonder if Japan has some kind of Yahoo Maps.

UPD: yes, they do, and these seem to be much better tailored at local audience from the first glance.

Maps.me is now known as Organic Maps.

Or strictly speaking, it was forked by original authors after hostile takeover.

Nice case of how open sourcing was useful.

Nokia used to have a first class maps offering in India about a decade (more?) ago. Really well done and complete, for the time. They also had proper voice navigation, even in Indian languages.

But the problem with vendor locked services is that they tend to go down with the vendor. That's why we need a separation between the OS providers, device manufacturers and software providers.

It still exists; Nokia sold it, and now some EU automobile manufacturers own it and maintain it well - https://wego.here.com/ (apps for both android and ios are available, and you can download maps for offline use statewise or for whole of india). English only though.

Of course there is OSM, but also Sygic navigation provides offline maps for whole world, including India. I believe there are also some other similar companies. I don't think we are all dependent on Google.

MapMyIndia does pretty well in the cities at least. I haven't tried it out in tier3 cities and rural areas. Though the traffic information is still better with Google Maps.

Agreed. My dad always asks me what would happen if Maps was shut down? Do we have any alternative service? And I'm not able to give a concrete answer to his question.

Sure there is OSM, but apart from pure locations (which are community led afaik) I don't know of any good reliable service for navigation not reliant on Google.

Edit: Apart from Apple Maps as well. Just in case someone points out the major competitor.

Apple maps isn't the real competitor to Google Maps in India. It is HERE - https://www.here.com/applications/wego ... Google was forced to offer offline maps in India and EU because the Here apps offered it for a long time. (Apple maps still doesn't but it has a slight advantage over Here in that it licensed data from JustDial, an online yellow pages services, and so it can show the location of many retail and other commercial outlets better). Here had Nokia as a stakeholder, but is now owned by consortium of EU automobile manufacturers.

Apple Maps is honestly no where close to Google Maps. Especially in dense Indian cities with multiple roads to reach a place, some roads are not even there on Apple Maps. It also (like OSM) lacks in contact details of businesses, open/close time, etc. which are a real value add for Google Maps.

Hopefully some real competitor emerges.

All the map data of google is public, it's probably been copied/vectorized/etc, add some errors to it, remove some streets, shift the street a meter or two, you got a comparable service. Probably google has a lot of checksums in there to see if it's their data you're drawing, but since maps is almost an essential service I don't think they can abruptly remove it without consequences, one of which would be to allow a new service even on stolen data.

Scraping Google's maps tile by tile would take forever, and you'd never be able to keep up with the daily changes submitted by users, much less the network effects (traffic, live busyness, reviews, speed traps, etc.)

I have started contributing to OSM by manually adding my locality data keeping Google Maps as a reference. Feels good tbh.

Apple Maps wasn't super helpful for me when I was there. Even within cities. They don't have a big enough team on the ground (yet?) to detail the maps out

OpenStreetMap data is better for routing than it is for location lookups.

In the US, there will be the occasional problem where some local street detail is wrong, but things like inter-city routing work great. You can do it on device with several different apps, and there are several different providers selling route calculation as a service that use OpenStreetMap data.

This is the first time I'm hearing that OSM is better for routing. Will have to check on the available apps on Play Store and from the list given by @matkoniecz there is only mapy.cz which had the navigation and the app experience was subpar for me.

Organic Maps and OSMAnd both have on device route calculation and navigation.

There's an Android app called StreetComplete that asks users to fill in information about stuff that's around them, and uploads it to OSM. For example, verifying street numbers on buildings, down to verifying the material the sidewalks are made of.

For OSM powered apps:

- Organic Maps

- OsmAnd

- mapy.cz

Note: Google has clearly better car routing and shop listings.

But for cycling or hiking OSM is typically superior.

Have you ever tried asking for directions on the street in India?

My wife has! It always takes at least 3 people to point you in the right way

If there's a home developed alternative, it is significantly more likely to experience outages than Google's offering, given how terrible gov. services are in the country.

Wanna withdraw money from a Post Office? Be prepared to return back empty-handed because "Link down" or gov. employees watching cricket matches.

You mean this -> https://www.mappls.com/

To develop Google maps you need to pay engineers a Google salary, which is impossible anywhere but America.

You can get quide good (or for some use cases superior) products.

See

- Organic Maps

- OsmAnd

- mapy.cz

Note: Google has clearly better car routing and shop listings.

But for cycling or hiking OSM is typically superior.

And you can fix map if something is wrong.

There is a cultural angle as well here. Unlike America, it's quite common and acceptable in India to just ask someone directions which helps with the last mile directions so India doesn't need a perfect map solution, just a good enough one.

> Unlike America, it's quite common and acceptable in India to just ask someone directions

What? What makes you think this is unacceptable in the US?

I think most Americans prefer to be independent and not have to ask someone, but it's not really that rare.

If the person doesn’t know they may be too embarrassed to admit it and make something up. Which is why the last mile qualifier is crucial.

From my experience,if they do not know the route they say that frankly rather than making up something.

You’ve never been to Lahore I’m guessing.

Google maps is bad for hiking because they generate most of their map data from what the street view cars can see, and cars can't go down hiking trails.

It is bad because it is niche not very profitable sector. At least not Google-scale profitable.

And many hikers care A LOT about hiking and their maps. Hiking and cycling data in OSM is extremely good, as result of many such people being interested in project - as mappers and as users of data, including software creation.

This is just plainly wrong. Most of the data is licensed from third parties.

When Google maps started this was the case... But now only a tiny proportion is third party data (some business listings, some transit data, various icons and logos, ads)

Exactly how much do you think Google pays its engineers and how much does it deviate from the industry?

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